For every successful video game mascot to have earned immortality as a universal icon, you can find the broken remains of a dozen or more characters who simply couldn't hack it. Forgotten by time, shunned for their shoddy designs, detested for their abrasive personalities, or simply ignored for no real reason beyond the fickle whim of the game-buying public, these doomed mascots litter the halls of gaming history like the corpses of defeated monsters in a cartoonish corridor shooter.

For better or worse, mascot characters are as much a part of modern gaming as annual sports franchise updates and flakey 3D cameras. By putting a single, easily-recognizable face on a game, mascots help provide an extra element of visibility on titles which might otherwise be lost amidst similar efforts. At their worst, these bats and bandicoots and chimerical mammalian composites are bland, unappealing wastes of printing ink better suited to boxes of generic breakfast cereal than an action game. But when they work, a chubby plumber or smirking hedgehog doesn't simply lend a unified image to a series but actually embodies the spirit of those games.

And yet, even the best of them pale beside the perfection and impact of the original mascot, Pac-Man. (Yes, even Mario.)

The hero of what may well be the most popular arcade game of all time, Pac-Man's design is brilliance through minimalism: voracious proof that less truly is more. Though he's really nothing but a yellow circle with a triangular gap to serve as a mouth, Namco's classic arcade avatar was the first truly original gaming hero.

If this sight doesn't send you into paroxyms of nostalgia, you must be one of those so-called "under-20 gamers."

Pac-Man was the second major hit to originate in Japan, and it demonstrated once again the country's unique approach to the art of game design. Like its predecessor Space Invaders , Pac-Man eschewed concrete real-world analogues and metaphors in favor of a more abstract virtual world. Creator Toru Iwatani sacrificed the immediate sense of familiarity offered by a race car or paddle ball game in favor of something wholly unique and packed with personality. The proliferation of space shooters which sought to cash in on Taito's success had allowed gamers to grow increasingly comfortable with fantasy games, and Namco's creation capitalized on this change in customers' expectations.

Of course, to describe Pac-Man's origins with terms like "capitalize" is to attribute to the gaming industry a level of cynicism that had yet to appear. As of 1980, the most despicable trait to have infested gaming was a blatant willingness to steal others' ideas. Hideous afflictions like integrated cross-marketing and focus groups were still years away from tainting gaming's youthful innocence with their opportunistic evil. Pac-Man wasn't born to fill out bullet points on the back of a box, and his character design wasn't shaped by committee over the course of the development cycle. Whatever his success may have wrought, it was built through fantastic purity of design: a timeless confluence of function and form rarely attained in any creative medium.

Beauty in Simplicity

Both Pac-Man and his game were born from a sequence of creative contemplation and inspiration that has become legend. Designer Toru Iwatani wished to create a game whose theme would appeal to females and help bring gaming to a wider audience than the teenage boys and tired salarymen who spent their free hours dropping ten-yen coins into Space Invaders. Eventually, he somehow decided that eating was something girls enjoyed and would therefore want to do in a video game. Some time later while eating a pizza he removed a slice and experienced a moment of creative synthesis: the shape of the pizza resembled an open mouth seen in profile. He translated his meal into a hungry yellow creature who lived in a maze and existed only to eat. A circle with a chomping, wedge-shaped mouth, Pac-Man was quite possibly the simplest design imaginable -- yet simultaneously unique and perfect for the limited resolution of early arcade cabinets.

But Pac-Man wasn't the only resident of his maze-like world. He was given a set of dangerous foes in the form of four colorful monsters (octopus-like blobs with wide, innocent eyes, frequently referred to as ghosts). Like their adversary, the monsters were a brilliant combination of simplicity, functionality and charm that helped define the game; without them, Pac-Man's charismatic appeal would have been significantly diminished. While the main character was essentially a blank avatar with which players cleared mazes, the monsters had genuine personalities. Their rounded, colorful appearance belied the fact that they could kill Pac-Man with a touch, and their only facial feature -- their eyes -- didn't simply make them look cute, but also served as an indicator of which direction they would move next. Even their colors were important: cleverly, the programmers gave each monster its own nickname to describe its behavior.

An image burned into a million old monitors, and even more old retinas.

Pokey (orange) was slow but relentless, Shadow (red) followed Pac-Man closely, Speedy (pink) was fast but random, and Bashful (blue) went out of his way to avoid the player.

Within months of Pac-Man's release, seemingly every other game was built around the premise of evading something in some sort of maze, clearly inspired by Namco's hit. It was the birth of the maze-chase genre; while a few games had already dabbled in convoluted high-speed pursuit, Iwatani perfected it on his first try.

Atari's Adventure from 1979 in particular had featured twisty passages and breakneck evasion, but it was comparatively haphazard and the pursuing dragons weren't limited by the maze walls. The monsters in Pac-Man, however, obeyed the same general rules as the hero -- like their quarry, they were constrained by walls. Mastery of the game was contingent on learning to use the layout of each stage to evade the monsters, manipulating their behavior patterns to trick them with feints and slip past unharmed. The game became so popular that entire books were printed explicitly for the sake of teaching players tactics and the elusive "Pac-Man Patterns" which would allow a player to go for hours on a single quarter (these patterns recently allowed supernerd Billy Mitchell to achieve the world's first perfect score on the game). These were the first gaming strategy guides, which are now something of an industry themselves.

Despite these exploits, Pac-Man was an amazingly well-balanced game; as with so many arcade hits, the vibrant colors and playful character designs drew gamers to the machines, and the gameplay kept them breaking their bills for change. Perhaps the most important factor in keeping the action fun was the game's sense of fairness. Though Pac-Man was hopelessly outnumbered by a quartet of fatal enemies, he had a few advantages. For starters, he could duck through the tunnels on either side of the screen to appear a few seconds later on the opposite side, a sort of cartoon "warp" that provided a convenient escape from a hopeless situation. More importantly, each maze afforded Pac-Man the opportunity to turn the tables with the Energizer pellets located in each corner. Unlike the other 240 on-screen dots which existed only to be eaten for a reward of 10 points, the four Energizers gave Pac-Man the ability to devour the monsters and take them briefly out of the action, offering a temporary respite from the pursuit. The Energizers' effectiveness diminished with each level until the monsters were vulnerable for a mere split second in the later stages; the sign of a true Pac-Master wasn't simply the ability to survive until round 12 but rather to see that elusive 1600-point indicator every time an Energizer was eaten.

More than any game before it, Pac-Man was enjoyable for everyone. A novice could have fun clearing a round or two, experts could perfect their personal strategies and compete for high scores, and people who eschewed the violence of other games of the time could take comfort in the killing-free action of the maze chase (because after all, the monsters never actually died -- when eaten they simply returned to their homebase as a pair of disembodied eyes and restored themselves). And a game that was fun for everyone quickly became a game that everyone played.

Phenom

And yet, this wasn't the end of Pac-Man's pioneering success. As if revolutionizing gaming with cartoonish characters, intricate strategies, universal appeal and the entire maze-chase genre weren't enough to cement Iwatani's brainchild a position as one of the most influential games of all time, Pac-Man was also responsible for one last innovation. Specifically, the game's popularity gave rise to the first multimedia phenomenon to result from a video game. With the advent of "Pac-Mania," video games finally came into their own.

It's not uncommon to see game-related merchandise these days; for every game based on a film or toy license, you're just as likely to see a film or toy based on a game license. If you ever go to Japan, you'll probably drown in UFO catcher plushies, vinyl statues and gashapon toys. But prior to Pac-Man, it was practically unheard of. You went to the arcade and played Gran Trak 10, you bought an Atari and some games to take home, and that was about as far as it went. But once Pac-Man arrived, it was practically impossible not to find merchandise that had been made in his likeness: bedsheets, lamps, pencils, dolls, piggy banks, stickers, cereal.

The game that revolutionized the arcade also totally skunked the home console market.

Name anything that comes to mind and chances are that in 1981 you could buy it in a Pac-Man variant. A song called "Pac-Man Fever" actually managed to chart, an impressive coup for geekery even amidst the intensely nerdy New Wave scene of the era.

In a way, Pac-Man fandom outlasted the games themselves; Namco never managed to best their creation, producing only a few sequels of middling quality. American distributor Bally-Midway also tried their hand at producing Pac-Man follow-ups, albeit without the consent of their Japanese partner (which ultimately led to Namco to revoke their license). The American-produced Pac-variants were almost universally horrible, featuring unnecessary tweaks which destroyed the flow and balance of Iwatani's work -- with one exception. Ms. Pac-Man, a comprehensive hack of the original game cobbled together by a pair of American college students, is generally considered the best game in the entire series (to Namco's consternation, no doubt). Featuring variant mazes, improved intermissions, more challenging gameplay and a handful of other tweaks, Ms. Pac-Man accomplished the rare feat of patching up the few shortcomings of its predecessor without introducing any new flaws to the mix. The game's heroine (Pac-Man made feminine with the judicious editing of a few tiny pixels) and revised maze colors did an even better job of pulling in the female gamers Iwatani hoped to entice with his creation. Ms. Pac-Man is one of the most perfect arcade games ever created, deeply addictive two decades later regardless of its simple graphics and the fact that all the action is controlled with nothing but a four-direction joystick.

That perfection came with a cost; neither Midway nor Namco were ever able to top Ms. Pac-Man's beautiful balance of simplicity and strategy, and eventually Pac-mania petered out as the games slowly fizzled into ill-advised innovation and sloppy hackery. The original home port for Atari 2600 was so unforgivably poor that it's largely credited for the 1983 video game crash. In some ways, Pac-Man was responsible for more bad than good.

Even so, Pac-Man is in no danger of having its legacy forgotten or its influence underestimated. A slow but steady stream of ports, sequels and remakes flows from Namco's Japanese headquarters each year to remind us of the original gaming mascot. And really, is Tommy Vercetti winding his way through Vice City in search of hidden cocaine packages all that different than Pac-Man gobbling his way through a neon maze? Mascots have changed, but in the end, there's a little Pac-Man in them all.

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Pac-Man

Landmarks:

• First original gaming mascot
• Established maze-chase genre
• Demonstrated potential of characters in games
• Opened gaming to females
• Gaming's first licensing success

• Lock 'N' Chase
• Mousetrap
• Ladybug
• Crush Roller
• Ms. Pac-Man
• Any game with a mascot

Pac-Man at KLOV

Pac-Man... This is Your Life

Musings:

"I can't begin to estimate how many hours I've put into Pac-Man games over the past few decades. To say that I've been a Pac-Man fan for as long as I've been a gamer would be no exaggeration whatsoever: my very first gaming memory is playing a painfully brief round of Ms. Pac-Man on an arcade machine in the middle of the Sears showroom at age six. Sears wasn't selling the cabinet, mind you; finding arcade games in the most unexpected places was simply a matter of course in the early 1980s. There was a period of a few years when the only place in America where I couldn't find an arcade machine was the church lobby. And even then I could simply walk across the street to play a game of Joust or Defender in the rec center of the neighboring college.

"That game of Ms. Pac-Man at Sears is strangely clear to me twenty-plus years later. I was so very proud when the cherry appeared, not that I actually managed to eat the bobbing fruit and earn points for it; I was just proud that I made it appear on the screen. Later, I went to visit my great-grandmother, who simply gawped at me in confusion when I told her that I had 'played Pac-Man and got the cherry!' I have no doubt I'll still remember that video game incident when I'm laying on my deathbed seventy years hence and senility has robbed me of even my children's names.

"Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise; I doubt I've gone more than a few months of my life without playing any kind of Pac-Man game whatsoever. In the lobby of my grandparents' apartment, in the game room at Showbiz Pizza, every Saturday at Putt-Putt, you name it. I've played every single Pac-Man sequel created (except that wretched-looking VR sim), including the really horrible ones like Super Pac-Man and Baby Pac-Man. I even had the chance to play the exceptionally rare (and equally unentertaining) Professor Pac-Man in an arcade about 20 years ago.

"And of course there's the matter of Pac-Man merchandise I accumulated during my childhood: sleeping bags, board games, Jeff Rovin books, lunch pails, and probably even more clutter that has faded from my memory over the years. At this very moment, the vintage Pac-Man juice glass I used as a kid is sitting atop my computer, a chain of inaccurately-colored silkscreened ghost-monsters fleeing for their lives from our hero's voracious maw. (As a concession to modern gaming sensibilities, though, a happy squeezable Servbot has taken up residence within.)

"All of this Pac-reminiscence would qualify as obnoxiously self-indulgent tripe if not for the fact that these memories of mine are anything but unique. Pac-Man was so pervasive, so popular, so ubiquitous that the little guy stands side by side with Star Wars and Michael Jackson's Thriller as defining experiences in the lives of millions of people fortunate (?) enough to have come of age in the 1980s. Of course, our lives had plenty of other defining moments as well, but our first kisses and Christmas Eves at Grandma's haven't been merchandised quite as heavily as Pac-Man."

Article by
Jeremy Parish